Games That Push The Limits of the NES : Graphics Deep Dive

saying it looks like a 16-bit game is surely the highest compliment you could pay anything on the nes in fact it's become a bit of a cliche hasn't it something you're sure to hear in any rundown of the nes's best looking games and this is what i have in mind today i'm going to be taking a look at those console wrecking cartridge rattling blasters that could maybe pass for games on a more powerful system and i'm not just gonna talk the talk i'm gonna walk the walk too i'm not just going to tell you what looks good i'm going to explain how these games look a lot more 16-bit than they should but before i do this video is proudly sponsored by opera gx the world's first browser for gamers loaded with features you won't find anywhere else gxcontrol really lets you take charge of system resources allowing you to dial in just how much you want to devote to your browsing experience you can throttle the cpu memory usage and bandwidth especially handy if you want to keep a bunch of tabs open 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the description and why not install and leave me a comment with the hashtag installedgx i've been using opera for years anyway and this gaming focused version really does have a lot going for it and i can honestly give it a hearty recommendation with that out the way let's begin with batman return of the joker released in 1991 it's a textbook case of this looks too good for the nes i've heard it said many times that it looks amazing and well it definitely does look good a colourful evocation of its cartoon source material that manages to be about as stylish and atmospheric as you could ever hope an nes game to be huge fluidly animated characters leaping around in gorgeous backdrops crammed with detail there's something special on every level the nes driven to a thundering gallop the whole way through it's got the chops in every field the music the graphics and well even the gameplay whilst we're about it this is one of the system's standout titles but what about it transcends its console generation what can we say really looks 16 bit one thing that really stands out are the large number of background scrolling effects used to give a sense of depth all of which require some very advanced techniques to make them work the shoot-'em-up style sections are pretty nice examples of this you can see the background split up into five separate sections each one moving at a different rate to give that effect but this isn't that impressive is it yes this kind of thing was common in 16-bit games but it wasn't that rare even on the nes or the master system for that matter heck you can even see similar stuff on the zx spectrum we're going to need something better than this well how about this eye-catching effect used in the opening level for a bit of retro game shock and awe this is a bit more advanced we've got split scrolling like in the shooter sections with what looks like the clouds in the background moving behind the building in the foreground yes this is more interesting a much more unusual sight on a machine like this one thing that was really reserved for 16-bit machines was multiple background layers systems like the super nes and mega drive could have two or more backgrounds that could move independently of each other allowing parts of the scene to move behind others giving the classic parallax effect you could even split those backgrounds up into strips giving really eye-catching visuals like here in the iconic opening stage of sonic the hedgehog yes it's not quite as fancy but what we have here in batman seen again in dramatic style in level 7 1 still looks quite good surely though this is impossible on the nes it only had one layer of background graphics you can't do the same trick as you can with those 16-bit systems so how's this done well let's do some reverse engineering shall we with the debugging features of the fantastic medicine emulator let's take a look first of all the pattern table as the game is running this is the area of rum where the graphics are stored and well it looks like there's quite a lot of activity here that is very telling if you take a look at the pattern table of a old school game like donkey kong say you'll note that it remains static yes here are all the graphics for the whole game the first generation of nes games were limited to just 8 kilobytes of graphics and that was that batman though like most later nes games makes use of an enhancement chip or as they tend to be known amongst nes hackers a memory mapper the functions of these were pretty varied but in this particular case it's allowing for a much larger amount of graphics data stored in banks to be used and swapped in and out as needed and i think that's how this effect is achieved the movement of the background is being created by having the cartridge jump between a load of different frames of animation for those background tiles well that's my hypothesis at least let's test it out my research on the nezdev wiki tells me that to start changing the graphics bank being used the cpu writes a value of less than nine to the command register or memory address eight triple zero there's more to it than that but it's only the first part i need to look for to try this out using the emulator debugger i can set up a break point that will automatically stop the game when this happens allowing me to jump right in and see the code and here we are this appears to be the bunny let's see what happens when we replace this with a knob or no operation just telling the cpu to do nothing if i'm right we should see a big change in the graphics and yep with the game running again it looks like the background is now totally still but the rest of the game is still going just fine well near enough by replacing that instruction i've stopped to the graphics bank switching from happening stopping the background animation and also it would seem stopping batman from being displayed properly his animation frames must be in another bank as well but i think this helps explain what is going on when you see it as a static background it looks very much like a lot of other nes games with not much going on in the scenery the memory mapper though is what adds movement by constantly changing it for the graphics chip this is just business as usual though with what it's displaying being constantly swapped out from under its nose without it really having to do anything this is a very processor efficient technique it only takes a couple of operations per frame to make it happen but it is very memory hungry taking up a lot of cartridge space probably why it's used so sparingly return of the joker is a towering and graphical achievement and one that everyone seems to remember there's no mistaking it it does look great and yes it does have a bit of extra help from some circuitry in the cartridge but as i say this was very much the standard in nes games by this point and this particular mapper the fme fme7 created by sunsoft themselves doesn't really do anything that loads of others didn't already there's more i could talk about in this game if i could understand it but let's keep this moving a slightly more obscure game now this doesn't seem to have much mind share these days but it's worth a look i think from one american hero to another released in 1991 it's gi joe [Music] pork chop sandwiches aside this is a game you could easily ignore it doesn't sound particularly auspicious does it a license tie tie-in for a toy line these things are never any good surely well this isn't bad actually yes the developer's pitch started out with it's like contrabut but hey it could be worse it plays really well looks pretty good and generally rises above mediocrity in every respect and that's all well and good you may be saying but why am i getting excited about this it's not fooling anyone that it's 16 bit is it well gi joe does quite a few subtle but very top-level tricks if you look closely the developers went the extra mile here adding some details that really make this game shine things you don't usually see on the nes this boss sequence from the first level is a definite step up from the usual fare it has you face up against a jet plane by attempting to knock it out of the sky with grenades and i'm no army plane attacking guy but i don't think that's how this is supposed to work anyway silly as this is it does the whole boss fight thing but with a bit more flair than most games on this platform but this or any of the boss fights in this game is not really what i want to focus on what i really want to look at is this elevator section from level three but why on earth would i want to do that it doesn't look that good does it well no on the surface this might not seem that great but trust me this elevator is very clever now i've got to say that if this bit looked like this well it wouldn't be that remarkable return of the joker does this exact thing pretty much a vertical auto scroller going up this time something that's easy to achieve on the nes what's amazing here though is that the elevator appears to be overlaid on top of the rest of the graphics you can see the wall moving below it and you can see the ratchet mechanism through the gears it even casts a shadow on a 16-bit platform this would be easy to do but on the nes it really isn't there's not an obvious way to have such a large object moving independently of the background it doesn't have multiple layers with transparency like say the super nes and it doesn't have the ability to do it with sprites either it just can't draw enough so how is this done well let's investigate once again using some emulator debugging features first off let's try isolating the sprites so we can see what role they play and yes it looks like the edges of the screen the elevator ratchet and the brick wall are done with cleverly positioned sprites that makes sense sprites can appear behind the background as well as in front of it and when we show just the background we're left with an elevator with black edges but still this doesn't explain how it's laid over the screen how are we going to solve this well i think it's time to get out the event viewer this is an absolutely amazing and very powerful feature of the meson emulator that basically overlays information about what is happening internally in the console over the normal graphics it can work at full speed go frame by frame or even drop down into super slow motion and show what is happening as each scan line or each horizontal row of pixels builds up the complete frame of animation this yellow line indicates which scan line is currently being drawn and you can see it moving down the screen as the image is being constructed the dots that appear represent significant events occurring in the code giving you a clear idea of what is happening and when you can set it up to show a whole load of different things you might want to look at nothing particularly relevant to us happens in the first part of the frame the stuff we want to look at starts down here this yellow dot shows an interrupt request a feature of the very widely used enhancement chip known as the mmc 3 that this game has in the cart this is basically a timer going off that alerts the cpu to stop what it's doing and jump into doing another task set to occur when it reaches a certain scan line here you can see it's just before the elevator is drawn so it's a good bet that it's something to do with that and yes just to note this event occurs in this grey border area which represents the horizontal blanking interval the short gap of time between one line appearing and the next that occurred with old school analog video the next thing that pops up are these two purplish dots probably something we need to look at what's happening here well it seems a message is being sent to the graphics chip and if we jump into the text representation of this info we can see what it is a bit better two ppu register rights with the hexadecimal values of 22 and 80 sent to the address register without getting too lost in the weeds this tells the graphics chip the ppu to draw the graphics stored in the video memory starting at location 2280 and yes if we look at location 2280 we will find the elevator so that explains it no matter what else is happening when this part of the screen is drawn the system is set to stop doing what it's doing and draw this platform but what about this shadow i can't see that stored anywhere how's that being done well this next interrupt seems to be responsible popping up here to tell the cpu it's time to send another message to the ppu this time to turn the background graphics off entirely just not draw them giving us this dark band at the bottom the process then happens in reversed whilst the graphics are still off another message is sent this time telling the ppu to go back to the part of the memory where the rest of the stage background is and carry on as normal then finally the graphics are turned back on and it's business as usual drawing a vertically scrolling level until the next frame where it all happens again i'm not sure but i wonder if this shadow isn't purely for aesthetic reasons but maybe to hide some glitchiness that this technique causes let's see what happens if we hack that bit of code so it doesn't turn the shadow on yeah that doesn't look so good another tiny mystery solved hats off to coda shoji takagi you sneaky devil that was a good trick yes alright it's a small detail but this elevator section required some clever use of the hardware for an effect that i don't think i've seen in any other nes game actually i should apologize because in a previous video i looked at a very similar effect in operation c on the game boy and said the nes could never pull it off well i was wrong sorry about that why didn't other games seem to use this technique well i get the impression that back then these types of tricks were not that's widely known but also it's probably not all that useful except in limited circumstances especially when you consider the glitching it causes how do the enemy sprites disappear smoothly behind the elevator that's probably the final question if you're looking closely well i honestly don't know for sure i think it's to do with sprite overflows but i don't really know enough to explain it if you do know what's going on please let me know in the comments time to move on but before i go any further though can i just remind you to prod of that like button if you're feeling that way inclined and hey why not subscribe too that would be fantastic okay now a game that's developed a bit of a better name for itself than gi joe it's crisis force again from 1991 a vintage year for good-looking nes games this is one of those that always finds a reason to appear on those nes top 10 whatever yes lists it's a limit pushing japanese only hidden gem amazing vertical shooter lost konami classic it takes a lot of boxes it looks spectacular and it plays like a dream why it never saw a western release i do not know it's not like it would have required massive localization it's never had any sort of re-release either i think konami then is now just enjoys being bloody awkward sometimes there's no end of stuff to be impressed by here i don't think we're too far away from stuff you might see on the old mega syphilis there's so much happening on the screen but for me the obvious standout is the parallax scrolling these effects appear in a few parts of the game but this section in level one is just fabulous that's deep trench in a scene that's already scrolling both horizontally and vertically it brings to mind the fantastic compile shooter musha allest which appeared on the mega drive in japan the previous year this effect does look very similar to the horizontal split scrolling you'll see in a game like vice project doom here and of course batman that we've just seen but actually it's much more difficult in fact it's impossible yes the nes just can't split the screen up vertically like it can horizontally 16-bit machines could do this what was called column scrolling but not the nes or any 8-bit machine as far as i know so how's this being done well it's not this is all just a dream okay okay it's real and there's a couple of ways that this could be achieved but i'm going to guess that it works a bit like the batman parallax but the other way up this uses a slightly different enhancement chip than batman but it's got a lot of similar functions a quick look at the pattern table seems to confirm this it looks like the graphics are being swapped in and out and quite a lot of them too but let's make sure the event viewer might give us another clue those blue dots are commands sent to the mapper but there is quite a lot of them the text version of this same info might be more useful according to what i've read i need to look for addresses starting with c d and e and well it looks like we've got a few down here let's pick the first one and jump to that point in the memory e b d 0. well this seems to be a part of a subroutine that does a lot of stuff i don't understand too much for me to easily mess with let's look for when another part of the code calls up this particular subroutine by searching the memory for references to the start of it at address e b b b and here we are looks like this is stuff that executes in the vertical blank this grey area here the short bit of time between each frame being drawn a very sensible place to be doing stuff with graphics let's turn this jump to the subroutine into another do nothing knop and see what happens yep that's it the specifics are a bit different from batman obviously and there seems to be more graphics being updated but it amounts to the same thing really looks like my theory was correct that piece of code was doing just what i thought it did the mapper chip in the cartridge is automatically flipping through a sequence of tails stored in the rom to make those vertical strips move and give that depth effect which should be impossible it's the same technique that's used when these effects appear in the later levels and it's incredible just how good all these look their platforms on this level give a real impression of multiple layers when of course there aren't and these enemies that seem to move in and out of the trench in this level are a really nice touch okay okay one last game before i call it a day but before i do just a brief word if you would like to support me on patreon that would be fantastic follow the link below it helps me out a great deal so what is it it has to be doesn't it of course summer carnival 92 wrecker released in summer 1992 unsurprisingly this now often revered formally hidden gem takes its place alongside crisis force as one of those amazing japanese famicom exclusives that everyone says you should check out and yes everyone is right for once because this is a stunning game held back only by its bruising difficulty developed by kid corporation the same guys that did gi joe a company that very quietly created a lot of the nes's most technically impressive games in its later years this one might well be king of them all though coded by none other than shinobu yagawa who later went on to work on some legendary arcade shooters for cave this is a sort of proto bullet hell game that's got an amazing pedigree and a lot of fans there's so much about this game that seems well above what you'd usually expect on the nes the incredible speed and masses of sprites on the screen has never been matched done with some very judicious use of the nes's limited sprite capabilities there's also the soundtrack a real departure from almost anything else on the nes with an electro techno style sound that's heavy on the samples okay other games did feature samples but never quite like this it's pretty grainy but it really sounds more like something you'd find on an amiga shooter rather than an nes one but i think it's the graphical effects that we need to look at in more detail from level 2 we have this sine wave ripple of the background which i've got to say looks very pleasing you might have seen this sort of thing before but rarely mid game running so smoothly done with some clever horizontal scrolling manipulation but wrecker has an even more sophisticated effect in its arsenal and here it is this weird scaling and warping swirling thing it is i would say unique on the nes in fact it reminds me of this section in rendering ranger on the super nes it's the apparent scaling part that is definitely the most impressive it looks like the background is being stretched and squashed and the nes really doesn't have that capability built in the snares yes the nes no let's take a look at the background graphics in the memory well it all looks very static so what's happening well there's two possibilities for how this works number one it's some sort of eastern deep magic that harnesses the spirits of the ancients in some sort of mystical digital incantation or option b and this one is pretty unlikely really maybe it does have a rational explanation and i just don't understand it very well what i think is going on is that this effect is done by adding a vertical component to the horizontal ripple scrolling we just saw it's not just moving the background image left and right but also moving it up and down skipping some bits so it's squashed and then redrawing it again so it looks elongated like a chaotic concertina that's how similar effects work on other machines but the nes really should not be able to do this so what is going on let's take a look at the event viewer once again and examine some dots in detail is this good content oh absolutely it is anyway this looks a bit like what we saw in gi joe but for each interrupt we now have four rights to the graphics chip instead of just two these are altering both the horizontal position of the background being drawn and the vertical two in blocks as the screen is created giving the concertina effect i think i was able to stop the horizontal lefty righty movement of the background so we can see just the vertical component on its own which does make it a bit easier to see and yes bits of the background are being revealed and uncovered this hack was more by locker than judgment though it just confounds my understanding rather than making it any clearer whatever's going on the nes is not supposed to be able to do this i know that much it seems like a koda yagawasan was using some undocumented features of the ppu for some reason this effect only runs at 15 frames per second too to save time maybe well that would be sensible but the code doesn't seem to be working like that and well on top of that quite how those four rights to the ppu do what they do leaves me a bit befuddled it's only the third that has a different value every time based on what appears to be a look up table here in the ram yes it's either the ancient beast magic of the east or i've reached my limit that retro game mechanics guy probably understands it but i bloody well don't it's all a bit above my pay grade there's some stuff about similar techniques online but nothing that quite matches up with this in short wrecker is an amazing game that does amazing things and it's worth checking out but well an original famicom cart is not going to be cheap it did have a surprise release on the 3ds in 2013 but well that might not be available for much longer so get it while you can if you can i'm not a real shooting game aficionado but this was not just a technical showpiece but innovative in its game design too notable in every respect so yeah i think this is it now time to call it a do did i really do the job does any of this pass muster as 16 bits and yeah i know i know it's never quite going to be but i hope you can see what i'm getting at if you have any suggestions for future videos do let me know on well any topic but hey if you can think of any more nes games with amazing effects well stick it in the comments below and maybe i'll have a look thank you once again to my generous patrons your support is greatly appreciated as ever yes look at this parade of majesty thank you guys and of course thanks for watching and i'll see you next time folks you

Channel: Sharopolis

Views: 225,783

Keywords: NES, nintendo entertainment system, N.E.S. games that push the limits

Id: w8wYdFLOvCE

Length: 28min 21sec (1701 seconds)

Published: Fri May 28 2021